


A Single Spark

by eudaimon



Series: Garden Verse [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't as easy to leave Iraq behind as just showering off the dust. It isn't that easy at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Single Spark

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Catie, who loves Doc Bryan more than I do.

"He did the best he could. It wasn't enough. He was an American" - **Richard Brautigan**.

When he thinks about it later, when he stops to catch his breath and really _thinks_ about it, it makes sense that it was her.

Back at Camp Pendleton, back on friendly soil, he'd been wandering through the grocery store, faced with thousands of things that weren't MREs, wanting nothing. He'd been possessed of a peculiar kind of hunger. He'd picked up pieces of fruit, turned them over between his fingers and put them back at the pinnacle of careful piles. He'd pushed his hands back through his hair. He'd felt naked with his mustache, finally shaved with no-one to disobey. 

Discontent had been the operative word. Such discontent.   
The more things changed, the more they stayed the fucking same. 

He ended up at the cash register with a basket of nothing; bread, milk, juice. A jar of peanut butter. She'd been ahead of him in the queue, the hems of her dark blue skirt almost touching the floor behind her heels. Her hair was long and black, woven through with glass and earthenware beads. She wore long, silver earrings. He found himself staring at the sway of those earrings. She had a sharp nose. She was one of those women that his mother would have called 'handsome', his father would have called 'striking'. She had the most beautiful fucking eyes that Tim Bryan had ever seen

It was a moment before he realised that she reminded him of that women, the mother of the kids Trombley shot. That woman who'd been unexpectedly beautiful, so full of sorrow, and she hadn't been angry, so he'd been angry for her. It hurt to remember shit like that, and he looked away, feeling hot colour burning in his cheeks, remembered rage at the futility of it all. 

When he looked up, she was already looking at him.

*

Her name was Shararah and she sucked coffee foam from the tip of her finger and she took one earring out so that she could play with it while they talked and when she got up in the middle of the night, he found her in the kitchen with his shirt slipping down off her gold-brown shoulder. She read newspapers from back to front. She chewed one fingernail and let the rest grow. She was Iranian, in America for twenty years, but, when he looked at her, all Tim could see was that woman on the road to Baghdad, the one who'd all but ripped off Colbert's balls and handed them to him. He hadn't really been listening, Tim hadn't ( _Doc_ , then, and rarely anything else). He'd been holding a baby in his arms, latex gloves. He'd wanted to tug one glove off, so he could touch the baby's head with one bare hand, so that he could touch her gently and she could feel all of the boundless love and the helplessness and the _fury_ that he had warring in him.

He'd wanted to, but he hadn't. He'd stood there, holding this fragile little creature that was already dying against his chest, and he'd watched this beautiful, beautiful girl raging about what was being done to her country. He hadn't heard the words, but, in her face, he'd seen his own fury mirrored. The baby had coughed and cried and Doc Bryan had shushed her and kissed the top of her head. Lieutenant Fick had been watching him. Doc Bryan had held his eye until he looked away.

He'd wanted to hate Iraq, but he couldn't.  
He couldn't love it either.

The middle of one night, he found her in the kitchen, her cheek leaned into her hand and her hair tumbling over one shoulder. She was reading by the glow of the light over the stove, naked except for a pair of white cotton boxer shorts. His. The silver in her ears and her navel caught the light, just like the bare curve of her breast. She looked up at him when he walked in, the corner of her mouth catching in a smile. Her hair slipped across her forehead and into her eyes.

"Can't sleep?"

He shook his head and sat down opposite her. He always slept naked on leave and tonight was no different. He could sit down naked in his own goddamn kitchen.

"Kept listening to the fuckin' wind."

She nodded and held out one hand. After a moment, he reached out and hooked the tips of his fingers against hers, tugging gently. She turned the page; college football. She read it diligently anyway. He found himself watching her, which automatically brought him back to that girl on the road, black scarf, black hair, and the little life dying by degrees in his arms. They'd found Iraq fucked up and they'd fucked it up more by being there. It had all boiled down to that. It had all boiled down to that beautiful girl being allowed to walk down a dusty road in her own country and that baby dying in his arms.

When he looked up, she was looking at him.

"You're thinking about it again."

How to explain that, somehow, he always was?

"Yeah."

"You want to tell me about it?"

After a moment, he shook his head. No. He tugged on her hand and bought it up to his mouth, kissing each of her fingertips in turn.

"Let's go back to bed."

In the dark, they lay side by side with the fan whirring sleepily over head. Before she lay down, Shararah had peeled off the white cotton, lay down in just her skin and her silver. Tim eased a knee between both of hers, an arm around her waist, and they lay there, intertwined. Lying there, he could listen to her breath and forget all about the fuckin' wind. He closed his eyes and fell into a doze. 

Sand. Nothing but sand.  
With his last conscious thought, he wondered how many of the other guys dreamed about being in Iraq.

The sand gave way beneath his boots with every step and he breathed the hot, dry hair. He grew up in Pennsylvania, worked summers at the pool when he was a kid, life-guarding in the sweaty, pulsing heat. The heat there was different, like a furnace. Some mornings, crawling out of his grave, he felt like a pot just off a wheel and ready for firing. Sometimes, clay can't take the heat and it cracks. Tim Bryan was never made of clay. He was a stone, or he tried to be, but even stones wear down, or are taken away, piece by piece.

Sometimes, he was just so fucking tired.

The problem with walking on shifting sand was that he couldn't relax. Every muscle had to keep shifting to keep him from losing his balance, to keep him on his feet. He stopped, momentarily, dropped his head and shaded his eyes. The white hot pulsing headache had become familiar. He'd sat in the shade of Humvee with Stine on one side and he'd closed his eyes and he'd thought about Philadelphia in the winter, and all of the snow.

Not a breath of breeze.  
Until...

He breathed in and tasted moisture. He tasted cool water. He opened his eyes. 

Miracles. Tim had never been entirely sure where he stood on miracles. His mother went to church every Sunday while his father went to work, and they struggled, and Tim cooked for his kid brother and sister as often as he didn't, and he didn't see many miracles. Which made it hard to believe in them as an adult, when all he'd seen over and over again was how fucked up the world can be, and how often babies died.

Still, when he opened his eyes and saw it, Tim thought that maybe, just maybe, there was the possibility of miracles.

Tim Bryan opened his eyes, and saw the Garden.

He felt a familiar touch on the back of his neck. She was standing beside him, her long hair curling around her naked breasts, and halfway down her back. There was a tattoo of a broad branched tree spanning from shoulder to shoulder. The leaves looked very green against her nut-brown skin.

"In the beginning," she said, "God so loved us that He gave us this, this place, forever, as a home."  
"So what happened to it?"

He'd been there, to the cradle of fuckin' civilization, and all that they'd found there was dust and death and war.

"We let Him down, as children do, so He set fire to it and burned it to the ground, so that we didn't have to lose it more than once."  
"I've been here," he said, quietly. "Right here."

Her fingers tousled through his still short hair. He was going to Special Forces at the end of the week. There was a mission he knew next to nothing about.

"I know you have," she said.  
"It's still burning."

"Not here it isn't," she said, softer. "Not now. Close your eyes, Tim. Lie down and close your eyes."

He lay down in the soft, fragrant grass. For weeks in Iraq, he'd worn his MOPP suit, sweated in layers of clothing. The gas had never come. They'd just sweated. He'd grown sick of smelling himself. He lay beside her in the grass and he breathed in the scent of her skin and the trees and the flowers. She'd guided his hand up between her breasts until his knuckles rested against her beating heart.

"Feel that?" she said, and meant that, somewhere, life was always going on.

He knew that. Rationally, he did. But when you came home from the desert, it wasn't as easy as showering the shit off your skin and out of your hair until the water ran clear. Something always stayed. Pappy was always going to have a shiny scar on either side of his foot. Some of the guys had nightmares. Some of them wrote endless letters home. When he sat at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, Tim ran over the guys he'd treated, the kids he'd held in his arms and felt their spare weight, and he wondered how many of those kids died, and he wondered how many of them had lived.

"I never heard what happened to him," he said, quietly. In the dream, a tear overwelled the corner of one eye and trickled down his face and left a trail in the desert dust on his skin. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried, or he could, but tried to forget it. There'd been a girl who cried when he told her that she was going to war. He wondered how many of them had that - a girl who cried when she realised that they were going away?

She reached out and touched the tear with her free hand. His knuckles were still pressed against her bare skin.

"Imagine that he grew up," she said, softly. "Imagine that he raised camels and children and went to sleep every night beside a beautiful woman with marrying eyes. Imagine that he grew very old and very tired and very loved, and wore scars his whole life and imagine that, when he dreamed, he saw your face."

"Is that true?"

She looked at him and smiled.

"Why not?" she said.

Why not? Sometimes, perhaps, it was alright to let himself believe in miracles.

"We didn't do any good here," he said, and meant that he wished they'd done better.

She leaned over him, Shararah which meant _a single spark_. She cupped his cheek gently and kissed his forehead, right between his eyebrows. She kissed him and, behind closed eyelids, he saw a small light flaring in the darkness.

"You did the best you could. Go to sleep."

In a wide bed in California, home for now, Tim Bryan rolled away from the woman he loved for the moment, who loved him for the moment, no blood on his hands and at peace, for a time, in the Garden.


End file.
